The Vow You Made At That Bedside

He was twenty six, and he was standing on the side of the bed nearest the window because that was the side with room to stand.

There were things beeping. There was a nurse who kept coming and going and being very kind in a way that told him more than anything anyone said out loud. His father's hand was on the blanket and it did not look like his father's hand, and at some point in that long night he leaned down close and made God a promise.

He is not going to write the words here and he would not say them to you either. They were about the kind of man he would be from that night forward, and about a thing he would do every day for the rest of his life, and he meant every syllable in the way that only a frightened young man at a bedside can mean anything.

He kept it for a while. Then life did what life does. And now he is a good deal older, and the promise sits in him like a stone in a shoe, and he has never once told anybody it exists.

Here is what it has done. It has made him strange with God. He prays, and something in the back of his mind produces the vow like a document, and the prayer goes flat. He has quietly assumed for years that the reason certain things have not moved is that he is a man who said a thing to God at a bedside and did not do it.

And at a family gathering last month an uncle who loves him said, with an arm round his shoulder: have you thought about fasting over this?

He said he would. He has thought of little else. And what rose in him was not hope. It was a very old idea in new clothes: here, at last, is a way to make it up.

If you are carrying a promise you did not keep, come and sit at this table a while. Nobody here is going to ask you what it was.

Nothing about that night was disgraceful

Let us settle it before another word, because this has been carried a long time without any air on it.

There is nothing shameful in what you said at that bed. Hannah made a vow. Jacob made one with a stone under his head. It is what love does at three in the morning when it has run out of everything it can control, and it comes up out of the same place as the truest praying you have ever done.

You are not in trouble for it, and you were never once assessed on whether you kept it. That is not a courtesy offered to a man with tea in his hand. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who read what was actually happening in that room, which was not a contract being drawn up. It was a son with nothing left.

So no page here is going to tell you off, and no page here is going to pretend the vow was never made either. There is something better than either of those.

What His faithfulness is actually resting on

There is a line in the last letter Paul wrote, and it says something so plain that people often read past it.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Read the reason at the end. Not because we hold up our end. Because He cannot deny Himself.

His faithfulness is not a response to yours. It rests on His own nature and it is anchored inside Him, which is precisely why it did not move on the night you stopped doing the thing you promised. There was nothing to move. It was never propped up by you in the first place.

You are held by something that was never resting on your side of the arrangement. I am not offering that to spare an older man an uncomfortable hour: it is what Paul wrote and it is the reason he gives (2 Timothy 2:13), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, who takes it from a verse you have heard into something that changes what praying feels like tonight.

So what is fasting for, if it is not making it up

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than the one that rose in you at the family gathering.

Fasting is not a payment. It is not compensation, it is not restitution and it is not the way a man settles an old account with God. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and stands at a window at three in the morning, turning toward God with nothing at all in his hands.

And this is the trap set for somebody carrying what you carry, so let it be said out loud. Do not let it become the making up. A person with an unpaid promise will reach for anything that looks like payment: sincerity, effort, a stricter year, a purer heart. You are not asked for any of that, and none of it was ever the currency. Scripture says not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us (Titus 3:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that a stone coming out of your shoe rather than a doctrine you would agree with in a class.

Now something said here in the open, not in small print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because a doctor said no. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody because of a body.

And if tonight has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.